Thursday, June 30, 2011

I had the awesome opportunity to be a part of ISTE11, the conference of the International Society for Technology in Education the past three days. It was truly awesome to have such a HUGE conference hosted locally in Philadelphia. I feel I managed my time rather well and attended most, if not all, of the sessions I planned to. Twitter, and my PLN, helped me to catch anything I did miss. One of those missed opportunities was a flash mob. I have expressed many times that I would LOVE to be a part of a flash mob. The dancing kind, NOT the rioting kind. And what did I do? I was sitting in a room...learning. Which was also great, but come on now. There were double dream hands and shoulder, shoulder, shoulder. I'm disappointed in myself. Not for not blogging since February, because I was told specifically in the SIGMS (Special Interest Group for Media Specialists) Forum NOT to apologize for not blogging, because it is tiresome, which is true...but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed in myself for that too.

But back to dancing and learning.

My new favorite is fur.ly. Like bit.ly the URL shortener, fur.ly shortens a whole list of URLs. I've worked to build lists of links for students around topics, similar to pathfinders, but in this, my first year, those lists were very franticly thrown together, so I'm excited to revisit those lists and look at new and different ways to organize.

I attended sessions on Web Tools (another favorite is jam studio), Educational Activism (eh, not exactly what I was thinking), Teach with Tweet, Separating Truth from Fiction (a PERFECT social studies curriculum tie-in model lesson for info literacy for fifth graders, BUT if I tell you much more now it won't be much of a lesson at all), Teacher 2.0 (also different than I thought, but still great), SIGMS Forum (with several of my twitter librarian idols), Voice Thread (can't wait to use this more in the future), Taking Daily Announcements to the Big Screen (reassuring and invigorating with new ideas), Green Screen (presenter was sick, sub filled in...would have been better in a hands on model), Make It Work: Advocating for Your School Library (awesome!), and the closing keynote with Chris Lehman (double awesome).